It’s amazing how many experts on railroad operations there are on this thread who are thoroughly convinced they could do things better than the folks that do this every day.
Are things perfect? No, of course not. And they never will be with a system as skeletal and underfunded as Amtrak is. Even if it was fully funded and had multiple frequencies on every route, and double the number of crew bases, things would still go wrong every once in a while.
The idea that Amtrak crew management doesn’t “look past the end of their noses” is ridiculous and insulting, and shows a complete ignorance of how much goes on on a daily basis to keep things going. The trains waiting for a couple of hours for a relief crew are the exception, not the rule, and it’s specifically because of the proactive nature of crew dispatching in many cases. When things start to melt down, it becomes difficult to have crews staged in advance at the station prior to where the crew will die. In those cases, you do the best you can. Further, if the relief crew is coming from the direction where your train is headed, then 9 times out of 10 it’s better to get the train moving, closing the gap between where the train is and where the relief crew is, thereby reducing the total delay. Just because it’s at a grade crossing or adjacent to some highway or whatever, doesn’t mean it’s impossible for the relief crew to get there. Fine, a handful of passengers currently on board would rather sit at a station for 4 hours, being able to stretch and smoke, rather than sit in the “middle of nowhere” for 3 hours, but everyone else, who actually is still trying to get somewhere (including other passengers on the train, and everybody waiting at downline stations), would rather the train make some progress, and reduce the total delay, rather than extend the delay even longer “just because...”
The idea that freight crew dispatchers are somehow orders of magnitude better at this than Amtrak crew dispatchers is another fallacy. Heck, just look at ehbowen’s post a few posts up about UP fouling their entire mainline with a series of outlawed crews. I’ve also been on a train delayed because BNSF had a series of crewless trains blocking the main while they waited for their crews to take rest and resume their journey. And for the record, Amtrak uses the same van companies the freight railroads use to get crews to outlying locations.
When you’re dealing with long-distance trains operating once per day, or less, it becomes very expensive to maintain crew bases with a full complement of relief crews. A typical turn might only require 3 sets of crews for regular service (accounting for working time and days off). But you need at least a fourth crew anyway, just for some semblance of an extra board (in case someone calls in sick, takes vacation, is needed for recurrent training and such). That’s already a 33% extra ratio when ideally you should be able to do it with 20% or so. Now, let anything happen at all, and it’s easy to use up your extra board and still run out of crews. So, you could staff even more extra board, who won’t be used 90% of the time, or you go with the smaller but still too large (on a percentage basis) extra board because financially, it’s hard to justify having lots of expensive crews sitting idle most of the time. You can’t just fly in crews from other bases, either, because they need to be qualified on the territory, and there’s a practical limit to how much territory someone can be qualified on. So, you’re stuck with limited backups in case things do fall apart, which they do on occasion (this trip happened to be one of those occasions).
With these horror stories I'm reading here, I worry one day I will be riding an Amtrak train somewhere, and such a horror story happens to me. Hopefully it NEVER does, but you never know.
